Sunday, February 24, 2013

Michael Wesch-From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able---Reflection

The quality of light by
which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we
live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It
is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and
make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that
we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and
formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience
from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as
feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it,
as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living,
those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their
control over us.-Audre Lorde, “Poetry
is Not a Luxury”

I’ve chosen to begin with this particular
epigraph, an excerpt from Audre
Lorde’s “Poetry
is Not a Luxury” because I feel it details, in a wondrously poetic fashion,
some of the framework that I will be working from and the perspective I am critiquing
the Wesch text through. Hopefully as you read this post you will more clearly
understand why I’ve chosen this particular Lorde excerpt, but if anything is
unclear in my choice of quotes or anything I bring up throughout this post then
please feel free to ask for clarification and shoot me questions in the comment
section.

Michael Wesch

In “From Knowledgeable
to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments” Michael Wesch discusses
the ways in which the predominant current teaching methods are no longer apropos
given the new technological age that we are currently living in. He posits that
the current teaching methods, and the classrooms themselves, are:

built
to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher…the ‘message’
of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that
information is scarce and hard to find (that’s why you have to come to this
room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that
good information is beyond discussion. In short, it tells students to trust
authority and follow along (1).

He goes on to note that the new digital age has given people the ability
to access knowledge in a new way. In this new way of accessing knowledge they
are not simply taking in information that an authority figure is spewing at
them but rather they are directly engaging with the information; they are
aiding in its creation, its delivery, and everything in between. He argues that
knowledge, as it stands now, is not something that can simply be fed to an
individual, it is something that must constantly be interacted with and in
order to keep up with the way that the digital age has allowed students to
engage with information classrooms and teachers must change up their stale authoritarian
routine and find ways to “move [their students] from being simply knowledgeable
to being knowledge-able” (1). This means that they need to learn how to truly
engage with the material, they must be able to critically look at texts and
analyze them, not simply memorize ‘important’ facts and reiterate said facts
when an exam comes along.

Now, just because I am
able to summarize his general argument (at least in the way that I read the
text) does not mean that I completely agree with the points that he uses. There
were a few moments when I had to disagree with his statements, and other
moments where I felt he was simply not delving deep enough.

Given that Wesch
chooses to use the language of revolution, it is disappointing that he doesn’t
really deliver a deeper analysis of some of the systems that he rails against
and for. One of the dominant discourses of society is that of Individualism. As
the State has gotten more powerful it has worked to eradicate a sense of
community and collectivism amongst people (this is clearly an attempt to stifle
resistance, for no resistance can occur if people cannot develop a collective
consciousness). This idea of individualism and submissiveness (to the State and
those who represent the state i.e: Authority) is taught to us in many ways and
settings, and one of those settings is within the classroom. Wesch notes that
the current teaching methods often rely on the educator being seen as the
authority figure and that all of the students must follow the instructions of
said authority figure very closely. Lecture style classrooms do not breed
community, they breed submission and regurgitated thinking (regurgitated thinking:
we spit back out the same thought/ideas/lessons that we take in. The delivery
will more than likely be in a different order from the original thought digested but the content will be exactly the same). Wesch states that the “Web 2.0”
breeds a “spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration” (1) and
that new model classrooms and teaching styles should invoke the same spirit.
Doing so fosters community; it fosters connections between students with their
peers and their professor. It allows knowledge and information to seem more
dynamic instead of static and stagnant. The current teaching methods simply
reenact the same dominator/dominated; authority/submissive narrative. In order
to have a social resistance, whether it is within the classroom or beyond it,
we need to advance beyond the current methods into something that creates a
new, more revolutionary, narrative.

Throughout the reading
I took issue with Wesch's assertion that within new media we are able to be “creators”
of information, he states this first when he talks about bloggers crating
information (2). I have to strongly disagree with that. We, as bloggers or
writers, are not creating information. We are vessels for information. Blogging
has simply given us a new way to share said information that we have within
ourselves with others. Yes, perhaps we are providing this information in a new
way, but I would be hesitant to say we are “creating” it. We are simply
furthering the path of information. What we are creating…what we are producing…is thought. Thought based on
the information that we have collected, but we are not creating information
itself. We are compiling the information and turning it into something. On a
similar note, I did not appreciate Wesch’s argument that “our old assumption
that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set
up our hyper-network effectively, information can find us” (2). He then goes on
to use an example of a web app that I have never heard of, which feeds into my
opinion that his argument comes from a place of privilege. I could make the
argument that within academia there is SO much information, it seems limitless
and like it is constantly coming at me. However, to say that statement and that
statement alone would be ignoring the fact that academic information is hard to
find for some people. Web information, even with the ubiquity if the internet,
can be hard to find. Some people do not know what to look for, where to
explore, or what to explore. The question becomes: How do we share our
knowledge with a wider audience? Simply putting it online is not enough. How do
we cultivate the appropriate audience? What even is the appropriate audience?
If we limit it to fellow academics like ourselves then are we simply moving the
traditional classroom onto the internet? And if we choose to broaden our
audience base how do we ensure that we get as many people as we can, and how do
we guarantee that we are actively engaging with them?

A bit later Wesch
discusses the idea of the “crisis of significance”. He states that we need to “bring
relevance back to education” (2). I would argue that we would first have to
define what education is. And this is not only the job of the educator but also
the job of the person being ‘educated’. Why do they want to be ‘educated’? What
do they see ‘education’ as? What is the goal of their ‘education’? For me,
education for liberation is my goal. Therefore, the types of knowledge that
catch my attention are most of the things that I can find applicable to
resistance, resistance mobilizations/theory, forms of resistance, and
foundational to revolutionary action. This framework makes many concepts quite significant, even if it doesn't seem so at first.
To use this class as an example, learning about
media as a medium for ideology is critical for me, as I must be able to see
all of the ways that the ruling/dominant class works to manipulate and further
repress others. If I cannot see how they are working against us, how could I
possible begin to address ways in which to dismantle the system/structure? I
think that it is our duties as students, as active engagers with knowledge, to
question what our guiding framework is and what our goal is. Are you simply learning
in order to eventually get a career? If so, why is that? What has taught you
that in order to be ‘complete’ you need to learn things that may mean nothing
to you in order to be in a job that also may mean nothing to you in order to
earn a paycheck? There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, what’s wrong (or perhaps "problematic" would be a better word) is following a narrative that has been written for you without ever stopping to
question what the narrative is and why you feel the need to follow it. We must
all develop a working framework for how we seek and ingest
knowledge/information.

Because this post is
plenty long enough I will attempt to wrap it up by addressing Wesch’s “Not
Subjects but Subjectivities” section while incorporating another quote from the
magnificent Audre Lorde. This is, perhaps, the section that I had the least
complaints about (other than my overarching complaint that Wesch does not delve
as deeply into some of these concepts as he could/should). Wesch states that “learning
a new subjectivity [ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the
world] is often painful…You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become
central to your sense of self” (3). How could I note read this as “DECOLONIZE/LIBERATE
YOUR MIND!”?? Our knowledge, our current subjectivity, is not our own. It is
the dominant society’s knowledge/subjectivity. We are often taught frameworks
that do not allow us to further analyze our surroundings, at least not in ways
that would allow us to truly QUESTION, TRANSFORM, and RESIST. At the end of her
poem But What Can You Teach My Daughter
Lorde states that “even my daughter…knows/what you know/can hurt/but what you
do/not know/can kill”. We need to teach that!
This should be our working framework! If this were our framework then would we
not all be interested in gathering as much knowledge as possible and engaging
with it as much as we can? If we acknowledged the fact that the knowledge that
we allow to slip through our fingers could prove fatal (be it literally or metaphorically
in the sense of social or civic death), then we would try our hardest to take
in as much as we could, and not only that, but we would try to understand it
and work with it to the best of our abilities? And with the more knowledge that
we take in, the more that we develop our working frameworks for
life/knowledge-gathering, the more successful we will be at dismantling the
system that works to oppress/repress/suppress us!

To try and put my questions and comments into one section would be
impossible! My questions for the class are strewn throughout this post. I
suppose my biggest question(s) for the class would be: what is your guiding
framework for knowledge-intake? What is your
goal when it comes to education? How often do you question the goals that you
have that seem to be natural to you?

And, because I love this poem so darn much, I will end this post with
it.

3 comments:

I agree generally with your critique that bloggers are vessels and not creators- except what if bloggers are first vessels and then those posts, writings etc presented for public consumption are edited or dissected and re-pieced and then become part of something larger? What happens if the discourse changes as a result? Are they then creators? Or are those the same vessels?Thoughtful critique

I think your questions are somewhat addressed when I note that while bloggers and others like them may not be creators of information, they can be producers of thought (and that thought is made up of information they have taken in). "We are compiling the information and turning it into something.". So those that read our posts are then compiling the information they've read, edit/dissect/re-piece/what-have-you and are producing 'new' thought but still with information they've taken in.

The person who goes out into a community, interviews people in the community and does an ethnographic study and then goes and writes a paper may produce a 'new' theory or 'new' ideas but they are in no way "creating" information.

My issue with Wesch could be a simple matter of semantics. But, for clarification I find it important to note that by calling these people vessels I'm not saying they are completely unoriginal and that we can never be creators/producers. I simply do not believe 'bloggers', as Wesch states, can be creators of information. They produce thought, but they don't create information.